'Before, During, After,’ by Richard Bausch: review

Published 5:07 pm, Friday, November 14, 2014

There have been only a handful of really good 9/11 novels: Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” Jay McInerney’s “The Good Life,” and Don DeLillo’s “Falling Man.” A couple of ill-conceived ones come to mind, too — Updike’s “Terrorist,” whose teenage Arab protagonist oddly possesses the author’s prodigious vocabulary and a complex capacity for Updikean thought and theology; and then there’s Andre Dubus III’s Extremely Flawed and Incredibly Cliched “Garden of Last Days.”

To the first list add Richard Bausch’s “Before, During, After,” where the September abyss becomes the background for a love story that spans the time of the title. Bauhaus, a transplanted Southerner who now teaches at Chapman University in Orange, in Southern California, has won several awards in a long writing career that now includes a dozen novels and eight story collections. He won the 2012 Rea Award for the Short Story, given “for originality and influence on the genre,” and the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for his 11th novel, “Peace,” about three lost soldiers during World War II.

In his new novel, the lovers are Southerners Michael Faulk, a 48-year-old former Episcopalian priest, and the 32-year-old Natasha Barrett, an assistant to Mississippi Sen. Tom Norland. At his fundraiser, Norland introduces the two as fellow Memphis residents. After a brief but robust romance, the couple decide to marry. But before the wedding, Natasha goes off to Jamaica with her friend Constance Waverly, and Faulk heads to New York to attend the wedding of a family friend. They take those trips before Sept. 11, 2001.

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Natasha’s Jamaica vacation goes well for a while, a little too well. She drinks and parties with her friends and with a guy named Nicholas Duego, who becomes the secret source of her despair. Near the end of her trip, she not only finds herself depressed and in an abyss of sorts, but she also believes her fiance might have been killed during the attack in New York. After a time and some travel and telecommunication difficulties, though, she discovers that Faulk is alive, and she finally gets a flight out of Jamaica back to the States.

After Natasha and Faulk return home and prepare for their October wedding, Faulk notices a change in Natasha’s feelings toward him, instigated by “the darkbackward and abysm of time,” a line from Shakespeare’s “Tempest” and embroidered on her grandmother’s pillow. Natasha’s behavior has so changed that her friends doubt her honesty and loyalty. Her behavior toward Faulk changes so much that it instills in him a storm of jealousy that intensifies to such a degree that the Shakespearean play you think of is no longer “The Tempest,” it’s “Othello.”

Faulk doesn’t help himself or his situation by drinking heavily. And Natasha’s friends, the aptly and ironically named Constance Waverly and Marsha Trunan, are little help: they’re neither constant nor true. They contribute to Faulk’s doubt of Natasha’s loyalty, and he struggles to adjust himself to this new Natasha. Faulk eventually raises the courage to tell her, “But you’re different. Something’s changed.”

Yet they do go through with the marriage, although Natasha’s anguish and depression concerning her secret about her Jamaican trip deepens and Faulk’s doubt intensifies — even after the wedding. Their tormented mental states lead into such abysses that they become analogous to those widespread emotional abysses caused by the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

There are no postmodern effects in this story — no fantasy, only realism, and Bausch is nothing if not a first-rate realist and traditional storyteller, but that doesn’t keep him from referencing Shakespeare and Thomas Aquinas. So Faulk is not just a semi-heavy-drinking former priest consumed with Othello-like jealousy, he is philosophical in the manner of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose “Summa Theologica“ he reads in trying to understand himself and his doubts and lessen his anxiety about his relationship with Natasha, her behavior and her secret.

Faulk finds reading Catholic theology calming. So he adopts the dialectic and poses questions to himself: “Whether, putting aside her simple kindness, any evidence exists of my wife’s former passion for me?” to which he answers with evidence, objections and counter-replies. It’s a dialectic that he finds lessens his anxiety “with the concentration it took to keep to the specific form of inquiry” and kept him “grounded,” until she finally reveals her secret.

Bausch’s tangential approach to the tragic 9/11 attacks suits his story well in that reality and tale artfully complement the emotional impact of each other. His love story, though, is not a tragic one; it’s a brilliant blend of tragedy and romance, whose resolution seems comedic. At the story’s end, it would seem that a happy future awaits this couple, especially when Natasha gives Faulk some ostensibly good news, but given Faulk’s weakness for jealousy and doubt, all does not end as well as it might seem.